Recently, an increasing number of control researchers have been putting efforts in human-robot interaction (HRI). This attention on new intelligent control methods for HRI is motivated by the benefit of synergizing human intelligence with collaborative robots to improve the joint human-robot system performance and reduce manpower and workload. There is a significant number of civilian and military applications where autonomous robots, endowed with communication, sensing and actuation capabilities perform tasks with a human-in-the-loop, in order to achieve a desired global goal. This is one of the main reasons why this area is attracting more and more researchers from the control engineering field.

However, the model, analysis, and implementation of effective HRI remain largely an open problem. Recent works in supervisory control (human-on-the-loop) consider multi-robot systems, swarming networks, and multi-operator control. Human-in-the-loop approaches formulate the human factors as external inputs to autonomous agents and embed them into control frameworks such as model predictive control and consensus. These tasks usually require continuous human attention and near constant responses. Some recent work in control theory research has been undertaken to investigate the modeling of human decision-making process, workload management based on dynamical queuing, and concurrent manual and autonomous control. While the existing results do provide a firm foundation for novel discoveries in HRI, current research remains highly specialized and fails to provide system-level performance guarantees and analytical elucidation of human factors. There is a great demand for verifiable, reliable, and scalable algorithms to serve HRI systems, where the control systems theory and engineering can contribute significantly.

The objective of this workshop is to present the new developments in the modeling and control of human-robot interaction (HRI) to address the above issue, especially the new intelligent control methods that enable the collaboration between humans and robotic systems. This is an interdisciplinary research area across the controls, robotics, and human factors communities. We wish to identify the key challenges of robot control with a human-in-the-loop, to explore the degree to which core elements of control theory contribute to HRI, and to anticipate the future innovation in bringing human and autonomous robotic systems together. This workshop aims at promoting a discussion to identify and define the overarching ideas that can tie together different research directions in control theory and HRI.